Following on from several years of more hard-hitting, London-focused film projects – including the 2020 Small Axe series of five films that charted the lives of West Indian immigrants to the city, codirecting the documentary Uprising (2021) on a 1981 fire in South London, and his filmic monument Grenfell (2023), a single-shot circling of the site of the tragic 2017 apartment block fire – the gap between McQueen’s art and cinema projects feels wider of late. This year, McQueen received a solo exhibition that continues to occupy both Dia sites in New York, with several film works and a new photographic series on display in the institution’s Chelsea space, and in a massive former factory site Beacon is his new installation Bass, the basement space filled only with coloured lighting and reverberating with snatches of music (The music an extended jam session, recorded in-situ, between different forms of the titular instrument, played by a stellar ensemble that included Meshell Ndegeochello and jazz veteran Marcus Miller.) The show received widespread acclaim, and will travel to Switzerland’s Schaulager next year. He also released the documentary Occupied City, in which he slowly traced and filmed all the locations that appear in author, historian and producer (and McQueen’s wife) Bianca Stigter’s book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940–1945 (2019). Offering a meditative study of the Dutch capital under the Nazis, it was a cinematic tour de force that lasted nearly four-and-a-half hours.

So far, so auteur. McQueen’s second celluloid outing this year, Blitz, however, which opened to mixed reviews, demonstrated how mainstream he can go. Telling the story of a young boy during the World War II bombing of London, it was ‘an old-fashioned children’s adventure movie, a rollicking yarn that might have been on television on a Bank Holiday afternoon’, thought the BBC. ‘Shockingly conventional’, Variety noted. But McQueen seems confident straddling both documentary and fiction forms, as well as arthouse and (attempted) blockbuster modes, and continues to serve as a model to artists who might want to make work that can occupy the gallery, the cinema, as well as home streaming platforms.